


Perpetual Yesterday

by elena_stidham



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Afterlife, And they're both learning to move on and let go, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Death, Heavy Angst, In which Ash is in the In-Between and watching over Eiji for years, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, The lovely bones au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 07:59:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18027833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elena_stidham/pseuds/elena_stidham
Summary: “Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.”― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones





	Perpetual Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS FOR: Death, pretty vivid mentions of death and rape and sometimes suicide, a consensual and brief sex scene
> 
> SONGS USED TO GET IN THE MOOD: The Lovely Bones soundtrack 
> 
> So I am in the process of working on my own original novel (which I imagined better as an anime or TV show but I can’t screen write well so I made do) and I imagined the song “Alice” by Cocteau Twins being a really fitting ending theme for each episode. Then something clicked with Banana Fish and I imagined how well The Lovely Bones would fit in this universe. So I rewatched the movie and sobbed and went: yes. This is what’s next. Then I read Garden of Light and just sobbed. And with that: there’s this fic, with Ash stuck in the In-Between watching over Eiji. I promise I have a light-hearted fic in the making involving Ash and Shorter but for now…angst is all I know. 
> 
> My tumblr is elenastidham, and in the bio there’s links you can follow to support me and my other works further. If you like Zelda, my Zelda tumblr is minuetofthewild. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> -Elena

He was one of those people – those unlucky people – to whom bad things happen for no reason.

Ash Lynx’s life was a terror. An absolute rampage of horror. There was nothing graceful or wonderful about it. It was a constant cycle of tragedy after tragedy, and this continued all the way up until the day he died.

He knows what he’s done. Very well, too. Yet despite this blatant suicide he can still feel a part of him still is wandering – wandering, wandering, wandering – all the way to the airport, where he knows Eiji will be waiting for him on the inside.

Aslan Callenreese was dead long before there were any injuries to obtain.  

* * *

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth that they watch. But Ash Lynx was not caught in heaven, nor could he be found in hell. He’s somewhere in the In-Between, where he’s not quite in one place but he’s not quite in the other either. Perhaps this is what the Christians would call Purgatory. He cannot recall – Bible Study was a brief memory of Cape Cod, caught somewhere in the Long Time Ago.

It’s here where Ash can watch over Eiji. He can put anything in this world here, but he doesn’t choose for much. It’s the necessities, the little remnants in his life that symbolise something more to him. A lighthouse. An open sea where pieces of a bloody paper swim with him underneath. The only thing holding him afloat now is this tiny corner of the library with a table, light, and chair he had built for himself. The books he can read here are all the same as he’s read while he was alive, every last page in his living memory are all that remains here.

This is his gazebo, his anchor to security. And it’s from here where he peers through the windowless walls and he sees Eiji. He watches, somewhere in this empty silence by himself, the day Eiji’s finally been told about his passing.

He’s not sure what hurts worse, the sound of his cries or the fact that he waited to emit them once he was alone in the hospital room.

He had never heard wailing with such an intense feeling of mourning. The closest he had come to while he was alive had only been with himself, in those dreaded nights where he’s lost all that he would ever hold dear. All that remains is Eiji, and Eiji had nothing but remains.

It’s a sickening twist of fate, irony. When his body was discovered half drained in the library, it was only reported as the death of another gang member and brushed off entirely. His death meant nothing to the ever-spinning world, his body marked and stamped as karma and good riddance to his breed of scum on earth. To the world, Ash Lynx had already died long prior, and the world mourned the tragedy of that little boy in Club Cod. There was no room for this kind of sympathy for Aslan Callenreese. And now, Ash only gets to watch, as Eiji weeps through the loss of the most important person in his life.

Ash only gets to watch as he cries with him.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” a voice says, finally. It’s a voice that’s familiar, but the tone alone causes Ash to practically leap out of his skin, turning behind him, finally matching the familiar voice with the unmistakable face of Shorter Wong.

Ash’s breath catches in his throat – this whole time, he thought he was alone, and in the middle of this whole time he had forgotten who he’d lost. Who he’d be seeing.

“Shorter—”

“You’re not supposed to go back,” he sighs with half of a smile. Ash’s face softens and his voice disintegrates. Shorter gestures to Ash’s face, which prompts him to immediately start wiping at the tears there. “You’re supposed to keep going.”

“Going where?”

“To heaven.” It’s a sentence that resonates a hint of why he’s stayed behind – because a part of him knew to wait, at least, until someone is there to bring Ash to the other side. He’d stay behind and torture himself otherwise. He was right.

“I don’t belong in heaven, Shorter,” Ash tries to say this as calmly as he can. The fact that the pearly gates are even open for him in the first place feels wrong, almost dirty, and he’s sure that there must have been a mistake somewhere for him to even be offered such a place.

Shorter just gives him this look, a piercing gaze that Ash can feel through those pitch black sunglasses and there’s a moment where he debates for just a second before he takes them off to stare at Ash in his entirety. There’s a soul that’s both found and lost in there, in a deep sea of pure emerald green, while Shorter’s soul is more or less the same, yet all the more relaxed. All the more sincere.

“Then I’m staying.”

Ash perks his eyebrow as he tilts his head. “What do you mean you’re staying?”

“I mean just that, Ash,” he sighs as he leans against a bookshelf. He vaguely remembers being told about Ash’s safe haven among there, but to feel the shakenly fragile security that’s been built with half of his heart missing – there’s heaviness there, needless to say. He crosses his arms. “I’ll stay right by you as long as you need. And when you’re ready, then we’ll both go to heaven.”

“Go without me, Shorter.”

He shakes his head.

“I said to go without me.”

“Who are you trying to fool, Ash?” Shorter says with only the faintest hint of pain. “I’ll wait. I’ll wait with you. Right here.”

For the next hundreds of weeks Ash finds himself haunted by the same dreams. The pain piercing his side. The smell of gun smoke. The blood that nobody saw. The sound of his heartbeat, like a hammer against cloth.

* * *

Of all the things he had expected Eiji to do, Ash would have never expected him to fly back to New York. It was so quickly, too – before his wounds ever dared to heal all the way. Regardless, he was back, a part of him almost unsure of where he should be going. He’s floating the streets of Greenwich, his eyes through his camera and his heart frozen solid and locked away somewhere else.

Ash can only watch, at one night, somebody asks Eiji if he’s got a family. Eiji tells them he was engaged.

It’s only been a few weeks since that horrific day they buried Ash Lynx into the ground. Only a couple months in the grand scheme of emotional time, when Sing and Eiji finally address this situation and they talk – with Eiji a few drinks fallen behind, the most anyone has ever seen of him.

“It’s funny,” Eiji finally mumbles softly, the tears on his cheeks are unnoticed and unflinching, like a tattoo tucked into the fat of the arm.

“What is?” Sing’s careful in his words. He’s not been able to drink at all that night. His eyes are only on Eiji, watching such sorrow pour from the heart still remains as one of the hardest things somebody can free.

“I never knew what dead meant,” Eiji comments finally, after a drawn silence. He turns his head towards the window and stares out into the starless sky. “I used to think it meant lost. Frozen.”

“It means gone, Eiji,” Sing says. “He’s gone.”

“But what if he isn’t?” Eiji’s breath shakes, and it’s here where he realises that he’s weeping. He does not bother to reach up. He does not bother to wipe underneath his eyes. “What if he’s still here?”

Despite this, he can still feel him. This sickeningly dead soul trying to cling onto life, as if it’ll save life somehow – and this broken voice, from this soul, will it be heard? Is it a whisper, or a wave of a whisper, undulating down—

“—I _am_ here, Eiji,” Ash speaks through a choked sob. He tries to reach out, between the books on his broken shelf, in this archaic hope that it somehow manages to reach its way over to Eiji, but before his fingers can even reach the glass windowpane, he’s gone. Everything, everyone, is gone.

His bottom lip shakes, and he has to shamefully pull his hand back away to wipe at his face and turn back to Shorter, who’s choosing not to comment on the whole thing.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Ash says finally, his voice caught somewhere on a tripwire. “I just wanted to save him. I wanted to make sure he was away…” he can’t finish.

Shorter knows what he’s going to say.

It’s a few years in, now, with Sing finally pushing past Ash’s age into nineteen one morning. He visits Eiji in Greenwich to celebrate this very fact, but of course, of all days, Eiji’s remembering things. He’s remembering people that shouldn’t be.

It’s when they kiss, a few drinks and a desperate attempt of healing into the night, when Ash finally realises how he’s permanently stuck at eighteen. He finally sees now that they’re growing up – and Sing has run ahead of the lynx. He’s only kissed Eiji once, and his heart was set then, but he so desperately wants to know what his lips would feel like once again.

At nineteen, Sing had sailed to a place where he had never been. In the walls of Ash’s sex there was horror and blood. In the walls of Sing’s, there were windows. Broken, shattered, windows.

Shorter reminds him that it’s always optional to watch, but Ash is insistent – knowing he deserves this. He _caused_ this. He broke Eiji’s heart and it’s only right if Eiji repairs himself gives that heart away.

He soon realises, though, that his heart still has not been given away.

Eiji probably didn’t even realise; he’s probably too caught up on himself, in the mindless pleasure, in the moonlight is careful yet shines so brightly while Sing thrusts into his body. He doesn’t even realise, that right as his moans start to grow in volume and as his eyes seal shut tight at the feeling of Sing’s length – he’s whispering the wrong name.

Sing pretends not to notice. He pretends he doesn’t hear. He almost takes his as his own form of karma, of revenge, for the pain he had caused in the first place. Eiji’s heart belongs to Ash – it’s _always_ Ash – and no amount of anything seems to take that away.  

He chooses to swallow the impending guilt that seems to be growing in his chest until finally he comes, quiet and painful, while Eiji’s peak is loud, his breath hammering and his heart still beating the wrong name.

Sing pretends not to notice. He pretends not to care. He pretends that he didn’t just wish that he had died in place of Ash, because Eiji seems to be knowing only misery. It’s when they’re in bed now, backs facing either side, while Sing finally cries quiet enough not to wake Eiji from his sleeps.

“Look at what you did, Ash,” he whispers to the starless sky. There’s a fire in his eyes, a fire that can only remained contained. “You’ve ruined Eiji.”

Ash’s breath sounds like a sob, and it probably is. But it becomes definite the moment he continues.

“I hate you,” he swears. “I hate what you’ve done.”

Ash had tortured himself enough that day, but he waits through it all, until Sing is finally asleep and the next morning he’s again hiding the pain in his eyes. This next morning, Eiji asks him to move in. He does.

Ash had always known this, but he never fully grasped it, until the realisation had hit him, clear as day: murder.

Murder changes everything.

* * *

This little girl. She didn’t know any better.

Sing and Eiji had grown apart from their broken attempts at failing to heal, but they still remain as roommates – better to live somewhere with a friend rather than to be lonely. For a few days, their apartment was a little more filling – Akira Ibe, the innocent child, someone so wonderful and carefree. A complete outsider. Yet, she made the insufferable mistake of being curious.

Shorter remains impeccably patient, but he’s starting to be a little more insistent on letting them go – but they won’t let him go, and Ash can’t properly explain why he feels a stab in his chest every time Eiji says his name.

This time, however, there’s a second voice, telling him to go. It’s alone in the computer room, where tired dark eyes stare at the blank screen, as if Ash was trapped inside. He was.

“You satisfied? Eiji’s yours forever. Is that what you wanted?” He asks, flopping onto the ground and leaning against the wall. “Guess what? He hasn’t gone anywhere near the public library in seven years. He won’t even go anyplace where you can see the public library.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Ash says, his voice cracking. He’s unheard.

“I keep wondering what you were thinking about, that day,” Sing imagines the blood slowly draining out of his body, and his blood pressure and body temperature dropping, during those long, long hours until death finally came—

“You must’ve suffered, a lot. Because the knife missed all your vital organs, and yet…you were smiling, as if you were having a really good dream,” Sing remembers the day he saw Ash’s corpse. At fourteen years old, he had never, and at twenty-three, still has never, seen a dead body smiling. He holds up the letter. “Did these have something to do with that?”

_You are not alone, Ash. I am with you. My soul is always with you._

Those words cut right through Ash’s heart as if he had been made of glass.

“Jeez, look at this. It’s practically a love letter,” Sing mumbles softly. Eiji’s letter – stained with Ash’s blood and with his tears. “It must’ve been this that let Lao get you that day, because there’s no way he could’ve killed you otherwise.”

He can never say this to Eiji. He’ll just have to keep it to himself and live with it. The way he’ll always live with what Lao did—

“It’s been long enough, Ash. You hear me? Let Eiji go now. If you don’t let him go, he’ll never be happy again. I need him to be happy, because until he is, I can’t…” his voice trails, before his eyes harden and they stare directly at the screen, directly at the broken soul.

“Listen to me, Ash. I’m getting him back from you, no matter what.”

Ash wants to scream. He _wants_ Sing to take him. He wants Eiji to move on. He wants the world to keep spinning and for his world to get better but he’s only stuck watching a never ending cycle of tragedy weave it’s way and capture his love in this web.

“I’ve learned something, Shorter, after all this time,” Ash says. “There are worse things than hell.”

Shorter wants to tell him that he needs to let go in order for Eiji to move on, but at this point it seems he isn’t sure if Ash knows he’s holding on at all. So he tries to be a little more subtle, only slightly cryptic, and he knows that Ash is smart. Something will click in time.

“You’ll see,” Shorter tells him quietly. “In the end you will see. Everybody dies.”

* * *

This Akira Ibe girl – she’s a simple one. She’s complicated. She’s her own piece of Ash that he had never noticed someone could keep.

“So that’s what it was about,” Sing thinks out loud. He and Eiji had been talking about her while she was walking their dog, Buddy. Eiji had felt a cry for help within her, and now he’s trying to do what he can to help her.

“I guess I was wrong about you, then,” Sing says, smiling softly towards the sun. “Deep down, you haven’t changed a bit, Eiji. You’ve got this amazing ability to sense the last, desperate S.O.S. signals people send out.”

He bets this is why Ash loved him. He was probably the only one who sensed Ash’s pain. Ash can feel this. He’s right.

“But there was one signal that I ignored, and that was yours, Sing,” Eiji says. “I pretended not to hear it. You see, I knew about the letter. I knew that my letter was the reason he—”

“That’s not—! That’s not true!”

“I knew about it, but I didn’t tell you that. I knew how terrible you felt, but I didn’t try to take the load off of your shoulders,” Eiji isn’t looking at him. His eyes are fixated somewhere towards the ground. Ash is watching from there. “I just kept asking myself why I didn’t go see him myself, instead of asking you to take that letter. I kept telling myself I should have gone, even if I had to crawl on my hands and knees. It was killing me.”

Eiji swallows hard. “So I just focused on hating Lao, and ignoring your pain. It was the only way I could live with myself.”

There’s a long pause between the two of them, and Ash can only reach up, reaching for him like he’s an angel and he’s gently calling out his name as if he’s a god. Eiji can almost hear it. He can almost hear this crying voice.

“I’ll never forget Ash. I’d never want to forget him,” Eiji says, finally. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy, or that I’ll never be happy again. Ash lived all out, one hundred percent. You and I know that better than anybody else. I’m just grateful, and proud, that I got to spend at least a short while in the company of that brilliant, miraculous life force.”

Ash stops, staring widely at this boy. This incredible, amazing boy – the boy that has brought him the purest form of joy. He holds his breath, hoping that this means the end, that this means a silent goodbye, that this means he’s finally starting to kiss his hands and let him go.

“I’m really sorry, Sing. For making you live with that by yourself.”

Sing has to process this for a moment, before he just takes a deep breath and looks at Eiji, whose eyes are carrying the skies. “I don’t know if I even ought to be around you, but…well, I know I could never replace Ash—”

“—Of course you could never replace Ash. Just like how nobody could ever replace you, Sing.” He feels eyes on him, and he turns, noticing the Ibe girl having watched nearly the whole thing. Eiji just smiles with it. “And nobody could ever replace you either, Aki-chan. There’s only one of you in the whole wide world.”

He steps close to her, his smile comforting and beaming bright. “Guess what? Ash’s first name was Aslan, and that means Dawn. Just like your name.”

With that, she’s crying in his arms, her face pressed into his chest. Ash can almost recognise the same way he holds her back from a night while he was alive.

That night, Ash watches Eiji rummage through a box of film with an A artfully marked on the side. They both know immediately what this is hiding, and Ash is almost dreading – what if he isn’t moving on? What if he isn’t letting him go?

“Sorry for keeping you locked up for so long. I hid away all your pictures,” Eiji comments calmly, softly. “As if that would make any difference.”

He carefully pushes the tape into the projector, Buddy sitting right by his side as the light beams onto the side of the wall.

When Ash was a child, he loved cameras. He loved the way it could capture a moment within milliseconds before it was gone forever, he loved how they were such simple yet powerful machines, able to tear apart the world with time and put it back together again.

But then he was kidnapped.

Then came the clicking.

Ash only ever hated cameras since then.

But now, for some reason now, the camera had stopped haunting Ash but has instead chosen to haunt Eiji. These boys are already haunted enough. Can’t they ever just be left alone? Besides them, there’s a light, a bright one – that casts across the wall for just a few split seconds of a moment before Eiji clicks the projector again and focuses on the first picture. It’s of Ash, being playful, grinning at Eiji with this cheeky smile across his face and a towel over his head like a shawl.

Ash watches carefully, now, and Shorter is watching, too – it’s not like before where he’ll pay attention to Ash and occasionally glance at the boy in his eyes. Now, there’s pictures, along the wall, pulling back memories that Ash had completely forgotten he had done while he was alive.

It’s strange, the memories you keep.

Life looked so bright and wonderful. So light. Even though these pictures don’t always contain smiling inside of them they contain all the love that was poured into each flash of light.

The only memories left of him now are in minds and in a photo gallery. It’s the reality of what they are, but who they are? Who they are is a question that it seems only these pictures have a definitive answer, now, in the midst of complete silence. By about the seventh picture there are tears falling from Eiji’s eyes, and Ash cries right with him.

What else is there for him to do?

* * *

There’s a day where Ash doesn’t watch Eiji at all. It’s hard for him to do it, but he has to learn sometime when to let go – he has to try. He remembers now, why he’s here, and what it is he has to do. He has to leave. But until before, he’s not scared to go. He’s not afraid leave the world behind much anymore – because Shorter’s words finally seemed to have sank in.

Everybody dies, and this includes Eiji, and in this period of lifetime between waiting he will continue to wait for him, but he has to let it go. He has to let them all go.

“Shorter,” Ash says finally, staring out past the bookshelves into the blackened water below. “I know where heaven is.”

Shorter watches him carefully, not saying a word, because he knows that he has to come to these thoughts on his own. And he does.

“Wait for me there,” Ash holds his breath. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

He can feel the smile peering onto his back, and so when he turns around to say his thank you with a genuine softness in his eyes, Shorter Wong is not there anymore. He’s waiting, he can feel it. He’s waiting on the other side. But there’s one thing he has to do.

Heaven has no room for pain that needs to be left behind. Ash’s breathing picks up, staring down into the water as it grows darker, darker, and darker by the second. He swallows hard, knowing exactly what lies inside, but he knows. He has to let them go. He has to let everyone go.

The bookshelves Ash had built around him were crumbling out, now, splashing down into the never ending sea that only seemed to swallow everything whole. The water is rising, now, or his little sanctuary is sinking. Either way, Ash has to hold his breath by the time the icy waters rise to his chin, and he closes his eyes tightly just as the darkness overcomes his cheeks.

He feels like he’s floating forever, but he doesn’t need to breathe. He feels the cold, however, as prominent as the day he had died.

When Ash finally opens his eyes, he’s not floating anymore, but instead on a bed, his eyes focusing up on a ceiling he hadn’t seen since he was just older than six. Panic surges through him and he scrambles up onto his elbows and aims carelessly, trying to fire a gun that is not there, at a man that is not there anymore. He’s still wearing his old clothes, but he finds ripped fragments of his baseball jersey leading up to the mattress and messy sheets.

Why here? Why must it start here?

Even still, Ash’s breathing is almost frantic, but also controlled, and an old fear that once dominated his seven-year-old brain was making its way back around his skin. He steps downstairs, noticing that blood was dripping from the ceiling, now. A significant amount of blood.

A rocking chair knocking over is what snaps him back to the basement, now suddenly aware that he’s standing upon bones. Piles and piles of bones, only a foot long at most – a couple inches wide. His eyes follow to the knocked chair, where he sees a whole body, intact, half smothered and covered by her own hair.

Flora Meyers. Connecticut, 1991. Eleven.

She was the first for him. An urge that he wanted to eradicate, but it turned into an urge that could never be quenched. Her parents had just bought her a new dress.

A baseball bounces down the stairs and past Ash’s legs. He’s scared to turn, but a force pushes him to where he does, and his eyes are greeted with another child. Their corpse was upside down on the steps, the neck swaying like a jigsaw.

Jacquelin Hernandez. Connecticut, 1998. Eight.

She was notorious for being shy and unwilling to cooperate, yet he had taken the time to build trust with her. To play with her. He had to make it count – he knew she would run home and tell her parents – so he was only able to use her once. He realised little girls weren’t quite his thing. But he liked the thrill of breaking children after working on them for some time.

Ash brings a shaking hand up to his mouth, holding in the temptation to vomit. He never realised. How could he? He was young. He never knew. A light flashes bright on the upstairs above the little girl, and he knows he has to walk up there around her.

Isaiah Foxx. Rhode Island, 2000. Three.

His father had just been deployed to the war in the middle east. He doesn’t know that his father would never return, and still doesn’t know what exactly sex means. He was the youngest of them all.

Ash’s back hits the television, and he instinctively retracts from it, turning only for it to turn on, clear as day, with the next victim’s last moments on screen.

Kevin Crumb. Massachusetts, 2003. Seven.

He was the only one that managed to have solid evidence on film. The screaming is all that seems to be audible – all that was left on his body was his ripped up little leagues jersey.

Ash remembers somebody else, and now he really wants to throw up. The shelf falls over on the right, and when Ash turns, a small, lifeless hand is reaching out for him underneath of it.

Tyler Maurice. Massachusetts, 2004. Six.

He manage to break himself away, but he couldn’t make it down two steps until he was pushed, and went tumbling down. He shoved the bookshelf on top of him to finish him off before he could get up, a few paper thin magazines barely cover the nudity.

Ash suddenly is struck in the head with a vivid memory, a violent plea. He hears screaming from the top of the stairs, and that’s when he rushes up, back into the room to save this crying child, until he stops to freeze and wince still at the sound of gunshot after gunshot. A body falls directly behind him, but he doesn’t have to look. He already knows this face. He recognises those hardened green eyes.

Aslan Callenreese. Massachusetts, 2008. Eight.

If he hadn’t pulled the trigger, that would have been his last day.

Cape Cod is a town of floating graves, cold and whipped by the wind, where the victims of rape and murder were far away from the minds of the living. He could see the other victims as they occupied his house, bones buried within his basement, those trace memories left behind before they fled this earth.

But the black water floods this house and overtakes him again, now this time, when he opens his eyes, he truly isn’t breathing. But he sees faces – pictures across dozens of wanted posters that he had once been in place. He knows who they belong to. Dino Golzine has a long list of those he’s raped and of those he’s murdered, and of those to which he’s done both. Directly or discreet.

Rays of light beam into the water, and it’s there where Ash looks and finds – that there is one body that Ash can vividly see. One he can remember. Her black hair has stayed the same, only now dancing under this water in a way that almost claims a life of its own. She’s still wearing the blouse he bought her.

Jesse Stayt. New York, 2014. Fourteen.

Her family was visiting New York from Detroit for family affairs, and she had the misfortune of being nice to a boy she bumped into at the public library. She only ever knew him by his real name, and after a short while, the feelings that came between them was only nothing more than a simple crush. Ash only ever talked to her, but when they killed her right in front of him, he will never forget how she screamed.

Ash reaches for her, eyes hot as if he’s trying to cry, yet the water swallows her back into the black hole. He hears voices now, of the dead – the remaining fighters. The last of those who couldn’t make it out alive. He hears Skip. He hears Griffin. He hears Shorter.

And then there’s a moment, between the heaviness that’s pushing pressure from all sides to the heat around his face, where Ash can only hear the emptiness of underwater. It’s a white noise that, at this point, would kill him if he has to hear any more.

_Please,_ he begs. _Please, let me free._

The light shines into the water once again, but while Ash remains swimming and unable to speak, a figure stands as if they are on the ground. He pushes closer, and he realises, in the midst of his drowning, this figure is Eiji. Their eyes meet and he smiles. He reaches out his hand, and Ash is desperate now to fly.

_Eiji!_

He wants to call but there is no voice of which he can speak.

_Eiji!_

Their fingers graze, before their hands clutch, and in this exact moment all of the water starts plummeting down, dragging Ash down with it. Down, down, down, _down—_

Ash wakes up gasping, coughing and gagging on water that isn’t there anymore. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and sees that he’s not anywhere. The world is only black, or perhaps an oversaturated, absurdly dark grey. He stands, taking a deep breath at the quiet world now.

Green eyes scan around as one of the only pops of colour in this world. He turns, and suddenly there’s a bed in this place, an occupied one, and here he’s sure that this is the last form of torture he must face before he finally gets to leave to the skies. But it’s not.

“Ash,” Eiji mumbles softly in his sleep, his hand dangling off the bed. He looks like he’s in pain. Almost. Not quite.

“I’m right here, Eiji,” Ash breathes out quietly, reaching over and taking this hand. He expects for his grip to go completely through the boy, but it doesn’t – and it’s here, a voice in his head tells him that this is a dream. This is a dream for Eiji, and with this dream, is the final time they’re parting ways.  

Eiji groans softly and opens his eyes, before they focus. This kind of breathing is relief, but are they crying? There are tears. This is where the In-Between was leading him to be. The final farewells. The perfect send-off. The fulfilling goodbye – the one everybody dreams of but never gets to have.

They have it.

“You wrote me a letter once,” Ash smiles with a soft, breathy cry. “You said I wasn’t a leopard.”

Eiji can only laugh quietly, his other hand reaching up and pulling Ash down onto the bed where they can feel each other entirely. This is heaven. It has to be. The relief in his chest and the joy in their eyes can only mean that this is heaven – but it’s not. Not yet.

“Kiss me,” Ash pleads, finally. And he does – Eiji does not bother for just one second to hesitate.

Their lips lock. They hold it there, before they lock again and again and again – and there it was, the moment Ash and Eiji never had. Finally, in this moment, could a kiss send two tortured soul towards the stars. Nobody would have thought just how much a kiss could set them free.  

* * *

When Ash finally opens his eyes again, he sees Shorter. They’re on the other side.

“Good to see you, buddy,” Shorter tells him, smiling, before he reaches a hand down and pulls him up onto his feet. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He genuinely means the kindest of his words, despite not knowing how right or wrong he could be. “Come on, heaven is right this way.”

He can see the light peering through these perfect clouds in the sky, and he knows instantly that this is where heaven lays.

While they walk, he starts to feel light, almost like the most pained and desperate sides of himself had been taken away and are gone. All that’s left behind now is a soul that had managed to be saved.

When others meet him up in heaven and they ask him for his life story, he keeps it simple. Yet, at the same time, he keeps it perfectly fitting.

_My name is Aslan. Like the Dawn. Last name: Callenreese. I was eighteen years old when I was murdered on September 6 th, 2018. I was here for a moment, and then I was gone._

If someone were to ask him if he’s waiting on someone, he’d say yes, just one someone – and in many years’ time, this one someone finally sees him through the gates. In heaven, they have their own perfect heartbeat of summertime, reserved just for them, but in this edge of the world Aslan does not have to see anyone else die.

He could fly. He was relieved.


End file.
